I'm reading a movie review in the NYT. I haven't been paying much attention to descriptions of new movies, but this one caught my eye because of its violently angry young female protagonist. It made me think of school shootings. I sometimes wonder what the entertainment business is trying to upload into the mind of Gen Z.
I see from Wikipedia that this movie is a sequel (to "Becky"), it was influenced by "Kill Bill," and it has an 89% critics rating at Rotten Tomatoes.
From the NYT review:
It has been two years since neo-Nazis killed her father.... Now 16, Becky works as a diner waitress... and fantasizes about slicing the throat of a sexist customer.
Neo-Nazis and sexists are deemed good targets of a young woman's anger. And "white supremacists and would-be insurrectionists":
All she needs is an inciting incident, and here, on cue, come the Noble Men, a clump of white supremacists and would-be insurrectionists....
You can see that the reviewer (Jeannette Catsoulis) doesn't approve of this formulaic bullshit.
[Becky] eavesdrops on their racist plans. The subsequent slaughters are inventive... [and] entertaining.... But the movie’s almost jokey treatment of its slobbering incels, combined with Becky’s comic posturings, hemorrhage the tension.
Our culture is dripping brain matter.
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57 comments:
I sometimes wonder what the entertainment business is trying to upload into the mind of Gen Z.
to quote John McClane: "Welcome To The Party, Pal."
"but this one caught my eye because of its violently angry young female protagonist."
Who needs movies when real life provides you with Audree Hale - Female-To-Male Transgender Mass-Murdering Eliot-Rodger Style Incel Dynamite, hopefully never coming to a theater near you ever again.
Sure, but will the authorities release Becky's manifesto?
We'll se ehow it does. Probably poorly.
I sometimes wonder what the entertainment business is trying to upload into the mind of Gen Z.
As the father of a Gen Z teenager, I can't help but notice that most teen lit is post-apocalyptic. Struggling kids has always been a theme for this age-group. We had S.E. Hinton, whose protagonists came from broken homes with absentee parents, who turned to each other for guidance, inspiration, and support. But society itself was intact and the kids suffered for the lack of stability. Now check out the Young Adult aisle of your library, look at what high school kids are reading--society has been destroyed, the surviving kids band together just like Hinton's kids did, but now that banding together, without adults around, is what saves them.
Violent "women" are a thing! Like the one who threw a brick at London Breed and nearly hit a kid.
Narrator: it was not a real woman.
As conservative have predicted with the emergence of affirmative action. Eventually, the only group qualifying for vilification as entertainment, is white males. And, this movie is force to pick an ideological entity so small, the FBI is force to game the numbers, pushing the phony danger.
For instance. The Jan 6 investigations traversed the nation. Usually the FBI would have one originating file number, for the investigation. But Jan 6, the local field offices were ordered to create a new file number. The FBI has labeled Jan 6 white supremacist terrorism and then blew the numbers up, be each field office filing a NEW event.
"Our culture is dripping brain matter."
Yes, a good line. But "our" culture is also a prog fabrication and the dripping a form of propaganda.
Couldn't suspend my disbelief. In real life Becky and the Noble Men would all be working for the FBI.
Leftists playing out their violence-porn fantasies. Call them incapes. As is incapable of doing anything like this in real life, so they make a movie to jerk off to. Should get lots of awards.
Neo-Nazis are now the equivalent of the old bad guys in the cartoons we boomers grew up with: striped shirt, Lone Ranger mask, and a sack of money they just stole.
After 9/11, Paramount changed the bad guys in the adaptation of Clancy's novel The Sum of All Fears from Islamists to neo-Nazis because--well, you can't depict real bad guys in filmed entertainments.
Ergo, neo-Nazis and white supremacists aren't actual threats, and everyone knows it. They've assumed the continuing role of Macguffins whenever necessary.
Diversity, incels, no less, insurrectionists, provoked or affirmative? No judgment, no labels, overly selective. Two thumbs up!
Woke Porn.
If the average IQ is indeed right around 100, that explains a lot...
Do we need to ruin three perfectly good names?
"Miss Ann" was a perfectly servicable shorthand in a past era
Now "Karen" and "Becky"?
I suppose that "Becky" stands for an entitled younger girl, but "Karen" is the middle-aged variant?
Why can't we go back to an even earlier convention of finding a french (latin!) equivalent?
I miss race blind Marxism of my youth.
Now do Muslim terrorists and then do Black street muggers, Becky. Oh yeah, sorry... Chinese spies might be OK, though.
Thank goodness Hollywood is providing some instruction on how to deal with all these White Supremacists, just in case one ever happens to surface.
The popularity of "Game of Thrones" an other violent end times themed books and TV programs should have given you a clue.
It has been two years since neo-Nazis killed her father.... Now 16, Becky works as a diner waitress... and fantasizes about slicing the throat of a sexist customer.
Now, that's entertainment!
Change one plot detail of either movie, make the white supremecists Islamic radicals, and watch that critic rating drop to zero percent.
Another 10 seconds to the trailer and I would have figured out the plot.
Kill Bill. One of two movies I've walked out on in my life. The other was Born Killers with Woody Harelson. Violence for the sake of violence with no redeeming value. This sounds about the same.
Heh, maybe I'd like it better if Becky were killing Antifa goons, going thru the Occupy camps with a flamethrower.
The New Left: It is OK to assault and/or murder white supremacists.
Also the New Left: Everyone that voted for Trump is a white supremacist.
Also, also the New Left: DeSantis is a white supremacist.
"I sometimes wonder what the entertainment business is trying to upload into the mind of Gen Z."
Gen Z has a mind? If so, it will be the end of us. My grandchildren are lovely and intelligent. They are also shallow, uninformed and addicted to their phones.
White supremacists, like zombies, are roughly 100,000% more common in movies than in real life.
Rounding up.
Kill Bill. One of two movies I've walked out on in my life.
I can understand that. I love Kill Bill and enjoyed the Tarantino movies I have seen. (I wouldn't watch Reservoir Dogs again)
I walk out of the slasher flicks. I have never understood why anyone enjoys the Halloween/Friday the 13th stuff. Nightmare on Elm Street and Child's Play were a little better I'm told, but they're not my thing.
It's possible "Kill Bill" is not what you think it is.
"Kill Bill. One of two movies I've walked out on in my life. The other was Born Killers with Woody Harelson. Violence for the sake of violence with no redeeming value. This sounds about the same."
Well...yes! This is "about the same" as many movies produced these days, both those released to theaters and many streaming online, (e.g., there is a British crime show called GANGS OF LONDON--two seasons so far, with season three on the way--that is the most violent television program I've ever seen, comparable to many extremely violent movies released to theaters.
I have to say, though...it's a gripping show! The Brit crime shows are far better in every way than US shows such as LAW AND ORDER and their ilk, which are generally childish. Contrary to GANGS OF LONDON, most of the Brit crimes shows are not particularly violent, if at all; they tend to be complex crime procedurals that rely on good acting and stories to create the suspense. Such violence as there is usually occurs off screen.
This is Goebbels level projection propaganda. We are literally arming neo-nazis in Ukraine and staging false flag Reichstag Fire type events in DC in order to obliterate the rights of opposition parties, and using this jujitsu style propaganda to pretend that it's not our own governing class which has taken Mein Kampf to heart.
Kill Bill. One of two movies I've walked out on in my life. The other was Born Killers with Woody Harelson. Violence for the sake of violence with no redeeming value.
Kill Bill has to be enjoyed together in its entirety. Part 1 is all murder all the time and Part 2 there is only one "kill" by Beatrix. They are an homage to the samurai movies. Part 2 has always been better for me than Part 1, but Part 2 needs Part 1 as the setup.
The whole point of Natural Born Killers was that violence for the sake of violence breeds more violence. It's the ultimate irony. It has no re-watchability though. Unlike say Platoon, also by Stone, which also has plenty of violence (with no redeeming value Stone would say).
Change one plot detail of either movie, make the white supremecists Islamic radicals, and watch that critic rating drop to zero percent.
Interesting concept. Shoot the same movie, but make the antagonists Antifa. Use the same actors. Just change some of the character motivation. Same action, just change the plot point reasoning for the characters.
The ultimate Scott Adams illustration of "two movies".
Of course, violence has always been part of entertainment for the masses. The gladiatorial "games" in the Roman Coliseum presented real-life violence to sate the appetites of the punters of that time and place. Many of Shakespeare's plays performed in his time depicted explicitly violent acts where characters would stab and slice each other with bladed weapons, the violence presented on stage using bladders filled with pig blood and innards for effect. Many Americans (as with peoples of other countries in history) would attend public hangings (or other types of executions) for their spectacular entertainment. We are brutal and blood-thirsty creatures.
"I Spit On Your Grave" was released in 1978.
There is nothing new under the sun.
I see there are already plans for another sequel. Becky will need many more movies to murder all of the Trump voters who haven't been brought to justice by Hollywood fantasists.
RideSpaceMountain said, "Audree Hale - Female-To-Male Transgender Mass-Murdering Eliot-Rodger Style Incel Dynamite"
What's its audience score on Rotten Tomatoes? Lol surely the critics gave it effluent praise.
Its $34 million budget makes it "low budget" these days. It is a sequel to a 2020 film in which Becky took on neo-Nazis led by Kevin James. Has there ever been an era in the making of US propaganda films in which so many filmmakers took on a political menace that was so pitifully close to non-existent?
Judging from recent events, we séem to have such an undersupply of Nazis that the government has stepped in to manufacture them.
Without seeing even a second of the trailer, in real life she’d manage to kill one or two before the others figured it out. After which she’d be captured, repeatedly raped, killed, dismembered, and the body parts disposed of. Hollywood imagines Neo-Nazis as low IQ yahoos who flunked out of school after repeating the third grade twice and they can barely read the owner’s manual of their truck. Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t shrewd.
The Wrath of Becky?
Is there a scene in the movie where Kirk yells into his communicator "Beckyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!"
Robert Cook said...
"Of course, violence has always been part of entertainment for the masses... We are brutal and blood-thirsty creatures."
And today we have politics.
At least Stifler is still getting work.
Change one plot detail of either movie, make the white supremecists Islamic radicals, and watch that critic rating drop to zero percent.
It has the advantage of a whole lot of Islamic radicals.
Violent teen girl is a trope not used in film very much. Men have John Wick, Jason Bourne, Liam Neeson et al too look up to. Outside horror and super hero movies not much female violence.
I can really only think of a French film, Baise Moi, that was about a violent female killing spree.
Maybe I a missing out on a whole genre.
Would definitely go see The Wrath of Ann Savage. Becky, not so much.
Jason's mom was scarier. Hiding under beds arrows, axe to the head in the shower. Sure the sequels dragged a dead monster from the lake, but the first 'Friday the 13th' was scary because "there are people out there just like that" as I found myself repeating in 1980 theater run.
Started reading 'Danielle's Passion' last night. It' is a woke "romance" satire. Danielle fresh out of Columbia forced to return home to Irvine, CA. Tolerating microaggressions and writing, yet unseen by the reader, articles about the deplorables who frequent the Burger Shack. Laugh a few times and read with a grin. Expecting Danielle will in the end have to face reality. Just at the part where she has decided she must save her high school crush/older brother best friend, former SEAL, now independent businessman of color. See, he doesn't realize his oppression having grown up upper middle class in Irvine and made it through BUDS.
"Our culture is dripping brain matter."
Well, yes. But at least we still have "The View".
Oh, and, I suspect you'll understand the strong stance DeSantis has taken on some things in Florida to try to put a clamp on this seemingly relentless train to disintegration. I mean, the dripping brain matter is all around us. Might as well pick a few spots where you can stop the drips, even if the press gets wildly wounded by it.
"But what’s worse
Is this pain in here
I can’t stay in here
Ain’t it clear that—"
Sounds like a wonderful way to pass an idle hour.
Sounds a bit like "Billy Jack" for Gen Z.
In the height of the Cold War, when the KGB and GRU were active around the world, all the bad guys in TV's Mission Impossible were South American neo-Nazis and/or leftover Nazis from WW II.
The film actually is setting the table for open carry including AR-15s. The woke cult is planning killings of whites. We will need fire power.
Maybe I a missing out on a whole genre
@Sean, yes you are, my friend. Go check out "I Spit on Your Grave," either the 1978 original or the 2010 remake. Plot is simple: innocent young woman is violently raped by a bunch of men and left for dead. But she survives and kills her rapists one by one as she exacts revenge in increasingly inventive ways. The 2010 remake spawned no fewer than three sequels (so far) spaced roughly three years apart.
"Chinese spies might be OK, though."
During Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month? Are you insane?
"Now 16, Becky works as a diner waitress... and fantasizes about slicing the throat of a sexist customer."
Well she better be earning fifteen bucks an hour while doing it.
"This is Goebbels level projection propaganda. We are literally arming neo-nazis in Ukraine and staging false flag Reichstag Fire type events in DC in order to obliterate the rights of opposition parties, and using this jujitsu style propaganda to pretend that it's not our own governing class which has taken Mein Kampf to heart."
It's the recent rash of BIPOC Nazis* that has me laughing.
*See alleged neo-Nazis Mauricio Garcia in Dallas, Texas and Sai Varshith Kandula in Washington, DC. It's absolutely surreal. And yet the masses buy it wholesale.
Becky is a racial slur propagated by Beyoncé, just in case anybody’s confused.
Jane's Revenge vs babies... fetal babies.
The Wrath of Beck vs [rabid] Diversitists (e.g. racists, sexists... genderists?, ageists, classicists).
Progress.
"And today we have politics."
We have always had politics...and in the meaning you intend.
"The New Left: It is OK to assault and/or murder white supremacists.
Also the New Left: Everyone that voted for Trump is a white supremacist.
Also, also the New Left: DeSantis is a white supremacist."
Also all white people are white supremacist. Even me, but, because I declare it I'm a GOOD white supremacist.....
The "New Left" has some deep thinking going on....
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